I recently had a surge of inspiration to run another campaign, after the success of the naval aspect of our Russo-Japanese War campaign from last year. However, I decided to give WTJ's alternate rules called Quickfirea try. Quickfire is a lot like Battlefleet, except the rules are streamlined considerably. You lose a lot of detail, which is what put me off it for a while, but it makes handling fleets much more manageable and it's also a lot more attractive to new players without any background knowledge.

So, last week Ian and Mike gave the rules a playtest! Just a few pictures for flavour:

The Russian fleet sets sail. The rules are very easy to pick up - I explained them to the guys in ten minutes. It's one of those games where you have a tracker card and damage charts, so as long as you know the turn structure you have everything you need right in front of you, with no need for a rulebook.

The Izumo and Shikishima set off! One of my favourite things about the game is that all the ships are unique, with their stats dirived from real world values using a series of formulae available on the website. This means each ship handles differently, and is a very good reflection of its real-world capabilities, while still being a simple system.

Cruiser Izumrud in the foreground. In our test game, she took an absolute pounding from heavy guns until she was basically a floating wreck, but stubbornly refused to sink and even managed to get a single gun into action late in the game. It was a considerable distraction, but was eventually sunk by gunfire.

Both sides played well, but Mike was cursed with some staggeringly unlucky rolls (five misses in a row!) which allowed the Pallada to be sunk very quickly. The Russians were fighting an uphill struggle after that.

The Shikishima and Knyaz Suvorov ended up locked in a gunnery duel at a range of a little over a mile. The Russians hung on and came perilously close to sinking the Japanese battleship, but in the end it was two against one and the Russian flagship went down in flames.

A hugely satisfying game. Not to criticise Battlefleet, but the same game would have taken three hours and a great deal of explaining. This was over in an hour, and I barely needed to step in and explain the rules after Turn One.

So what's the plan? As you know I have a number of ongoing projects at the moment, not least my Epic Imperial Guard army which is due an update. However, I did blow my Christmas money on four fleets for Quickfire, as well as a fantastic new uniform. This will probably end up being an alternate history Supercampaign - British and French vs. Russians and Germans, October 1904. I will be getting in touch with those foolish enough to have expressed an interest in Supercampaigns in the past to see if they want to be kings and ministers!

Anyway, all the best. My regular posting schedule will return to normal soon (these are all 'scheduled posts'). I'll be writing a bit about that next month and some big changes I have coming up that will definitely affect my modelling schedule - hopefully positively!

Interesting to hear you're not a fan of the term - if I'm honest, I never really thought about it and now I'm just used to it. Do you object on historical grounds or just aesthetic? I agree it does sound somewhat clunky.

I dislike it for pedantic academic reasons, it wouldn't have been a term used at the time as the people building battleships and such like in the very late 19th century would have no idea that Britain was working on an all heavy gun battleship and how big a paradigm shift that would be. What Japan took to the sea was state of the art at the time and whilst they were always looking to improve their technology so saying they were 'pre' something is admittedly a handy periodization tool for historians I think it is a little lazy and misses some of the important nuances. I'm not keen on the terms 'antebellum' and 'interwar' for similar reasons (although 'interwar' is more problematical as in the late 1930s some saw war being inevitable and 'The Great War' got the new name of World War I - the numbering indicative of what was feared to come.)

I agree it’s a very simplistic term that implies the Dreadnought was a sudden Eureka moment, rather than the steady aggregation and implementation of lots of different technologies that it really was. But it’s as good a point as any to differentiate between periods of naval construction, coinciding so nearly as it does with Tsushima. All these sorts of terms are constructs that would have been completely alien to people of the time. But I take your point that they are essentially arbitrary delineations, and the threads very quickly start coming apart if you pull at any of them. Lazy, yes - but history needs milestones.

Oh I agree with that, it is a convenient term as 'Ironclads' seems far more suited to the ACW period. I should really remember that I'm not doing my MA any more....

Funnily enough I think the more you know about the subject the more you care about the terminology. I'm just starting to get interested in the early medieval period which I insist on calling the Dark Ages, even though I know the term has fallen out of favour with historians.

Sounds like those rules are a good pickup Ed. Any game where a rulebook is almost unnecessary has to be a good thing where flow and time restraints are considerations (For us all). One day, you really should do a post of the fleets sailing past in all their finery so we can ooo and ahh and wave at the dashing sailors.